Absence in Substantia: Frequency

• Absence in Substantia developed through analyses of data within what I came to call the Protocols of Killings archive. This archive, declassified in 2018, contains the once-classified cables that passed through the US Embassy in Jakarta spanning the years 1964-1968. It’s a wide-ranging record of communications during the critical period surrounding the 1965-66 Indonesian mass killings. When I started analysing the archive, I found 798 documents titled “Withdrawal Notice.” These are placeholders of documents that are considered still sensitive, and so they were retracted during the official evaluation that precedes declassification. So they’re sort of the secrets that are made even more secrets, even more restricted. This is where I extend on Walters’ logic: instead of seeing the closure as a problem, I focus on this disclosure-generated closure as potential. I also bring in my personal experiences of liminal death, and political scientist Oliver Kearns’s work on the absence left by drone strikes. Kearns argues that “A political response to covert strikes must go beyond 'filling in' absences and address how absence gains meaning in implicit ways.” From these withdrawal notices, I extracted dates referring to the original documents, to output frequency and density graphs of these retractions over time. The resulting bird's eye views show a pattern that peaks around the first date of the killings, 1 October 1965, which you can see as the pinkish-red thread cutting vertically on this work. Here I co-opt the act of closure into disclosure. I know this cooptation quite well. My grandfather’s liminal death left an unfilled lacuna, a particular hole right in the heart of my family, so to say. But we knew that there is no point filling this hole with anything else, because without this hole in its heart, my family’s heart is never whole. In other words, this wholeness that fully considers the hole is exactly why absence can be of substance. I think of this as a method of resistance—this Absence in Substantia. Absence in Substantia: Frequency, is showing the frequency graph on one of its two sides. Another work in the pair, showing the density graph, is being displayed in my other solo exhibition at RMIT Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The other side of these works suggests the magnitude of the documents retracted from the archive, like an eruption of secrets from a document shredder, like the remains of something that’s destroyed with a pronounced presence.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Bildkonst (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Visual Arts (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Globaliseringsstudier (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Globalisation Studies (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Declassification

secrecy

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